Atari experiments
The MountainCar environment is a nice and fast way to experiment with exploration methods, but to conclude the chapter, I’ve included Atari versions of the DQN and PPO methods with the exploration tweaks we described to check a more complicated environment.
As the primary environment, I’ve used Seaquest, which is a game where the submarine needs to shoot fish and enemy submarines, and save aquanauts. This game is not as famous as Montezuma’s Revenge, but it still might be considered as medium-hard exploration because, to continue the game, you need to control the level of oxygen. When it becomes low, the submarine needs to rise to the surface for some time. Without this, the episode will end after 560 steps and with a maximum reward of 20. But once the agent learns how to replenish the oxygen, the game might continue almost infinitely and bring to the agent a 10k-100k score. Surprisingly, traditional exploration methods struggle with...
